Investments

Twitter

Twitter

Key Facts

Awards & Medals

2009 - Won the "Breakout of the Year" Webby Award

2007 - SXSW Web Award Prize

Kingdom Holding Company acquired a substantial position in Twitter in 2011. Twitter had been funded since its launch in 2006 via private venture capital. When KHC invested a significant amount in December 2011, the company’s value was estimated by VentureBeat at USD 10bn.

KHC believes Twitter is poised to be a cornerstone of the evolving Internet user experience. Its position in Twitter is consistent with KHC’s essential investment strategy – to identify “best of the best” performers in sector after sector. KHC believes Twitter is managed with a particularly mature vision and will differentiate itself with additional innovation and practical business models.

KHC believes that social media will fundamentally change the media industry landscape in the coming years And Twitter will capture and monetize this positive trend.

Company Profile

Established in 2006, Twitter is a unique global short-message social media network with more than 500 million active users who send 340 million messages per day as of March 2012.

Since its creation in 2006 Twitter has rapidly gained worldwide popularity. Its traffic volume places it among the Internet’s ten most used websites and its most important and valuable communications resources.

Users send “tweets” limited to 140 characters to their “followers” who can relay them to their own connections, resulting in instantaneous ad hoc networks. Messages may be publicly visible or addressed to particular followers. Adding and then searching for unique “hashtags” within a message makes it possible to connect all Twitter users interested in a particular trend or subject. This makes the service valuable to parties ranging from celebrities to political or social organizers as well as companies reaching out to customers.

Twitter began selling advertising in 2011 and realized USD 139.5m in advertising sales by year’s end, with a substantial increase expected in 2012. The company is developing innovative revenue opportunities such as a self-serve advertising system aimed at small business.